hard rider and good fighter,
and more than one of these petty chieftains, half-shepherd and
half-robber, who made good the winter inroads into their stock of beeves
by spring forays and cattle drives across the English Border. Scott's
great-grandfather was the famous "Beardie" of Harden, so called because
after the exile of the Stuart sovereigns he swore never to cut his beard
until they were reinstated; and several degrees farther back he could
point to a still more famous figure, "Auld Wat of Harden," who with his
fair dame, the "Flower of Yarrow," is mentioned in _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_. The first member of the clan to abandon country life and take
up a sedentary profession, was Scott's father, who settled in Edinburgh
as Writer to the Signet, a position corresponding in Scotland to that of
attorney or solicitor in England. The character of this father, stern,
scrupulous, Calvinistic, with a high sense of ceremonial dignity and a
punctilious regard for the honorable conventions of life, united with
the wilder ancestral strain to make Scott what he was. From "Auld Wat"
and "Beardie" came his high spirit, his rugged manliness, his chivalric
ideals; from the Writer to the Signet came that power of methodical
labor which made him a giant among the literary workers of his day, and
that delicate sense of responsibility which gave his private life its
remarkable sweetness and beauty.

At the age of eighteen months, Scott was seized with a teething fever
which settled in his right leg and retarded its growth to such an extent
that he was slightly lame for the rest of his life. Possibly this
affliction was a blessing in disguise, since it is not improbable that
Scott's love of active adventure would have led him into the army or the
navy, if he had not been deterred by a bodily impediment; in which case
English history might have been a gainer, but English literature would
certainly have been immeasurably a loser. In spite of his lameness, the
child grew strong enough to be sent on a long visit to his grandfather's
farm at Sandyknowe; and here, lying among the sheep on the windy downs,
playing about the romantic ruins of Smailholm Tower,[1] scampering
through the heather on a tiny Shetland pony, or listening to stories of
the thrilling past told by the old women of the farm, he drank in
sensations which strengthened both the hardiness and the romanticism of
his nature. A story is told of his being found in the fields d